


Borrowing Freedom

by TheRedGlass



Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies), The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Clint Barton Made a Different Call, F/M, Healing, Horses, Natasha Feels, Natasha Joins SHIELD, Natasha Needs a Hug, Natasha Romanov Has Issues, Natasha Romanov Joins SHIELD, Natasha has PTSD, Natasha in therapy, Natasha-centric, PTSD, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Therapy, equine therapy, horse therapy
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-11-04
Updated: 2015-11-04
Packaged: 2018-04-29 20:51:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,115
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5142065
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheRedGlass/pseuds/TheRedGlass
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Natasha Romanoff was granted a second chance when Clint Barton made a different call. But when SHIELD sent her to a therapist, saying she had PTSD, and they didn’t want her in the field until she faced it, she almost changed her mind. They were wrong, she was fine, and she kept every detail locked up, even as she watched her second chance start to slip away.</p>
<p>And then there was one more option, a less conventional therapy, and Natasha found herself in front of the first horse she'd ever seen.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Borrowing Freedom

**Author's Note:**

> I started working at a horse farm and got to be around horses consistently for the first time in eight years and I realized just how badly I've missed it, and just how soothing it can be. Of course, I always have Natasha on my mind these days, and I've always been interested in characters' struggles to overcome emotional pain, so the two naturally combined and I wondered how horse therapy might have helped her recover when she was attempting to make the transition to SHIELD after Clint spared her life. 
> 
> I rewrote this first chapter for Clintasha Week on tumblr. You can follow my exploits and progress and other Clintasha projects on [tumblr](http://www.thereddestglass.tumblr.com). I hope to start uploading the next chapters of this very soon since I've _finally_ gotten a chance to edit them.

_If you are fearful, a horse will back off. If you are calm and confident, it will come forward. For those who are often flattered or feared, the horse can be a welcome mirror of the best in human nature."_

_-Clare Balding_

 

Silence swelled, pushing into every corner of the hangar in the way that only tense silence can, rolling like an invisible smoke and creating a weighty presence, the way air feels taut with electricity right before a storm. All jets were shut down, and the only other hint of noise came from the occasional soft ticking sound of an engine cooling and the hollow echoes as Clint subtly adjusted his weight from one leg to another.

Director Fury looked impassively out across the hangar, staring at nothing it seemed. To an outsider, he would have perhaps seemed unconcerned. But any SHIELD agent knew better, knew that the quiet was perhaps worse then any yelling.

“You know,” he finally said, still seeming to address the air in general instead of the agent who stood beside him. “Personally I thought this whole damn thing was pretty straightforward.”

Clint swallowed, trying to make it not obvious, as a slight chill settled over his body. He was a grown man, but damn if Fury’s quiet intensity didn’t make him feel like he’d been sent to principal’s office every time. Or at least, what he’d heard it was like to be sent there - he hadn’t spent much time in public school before the circus became his life and what learning he did was snatched between acts out of lost or stolen textbooks, occasionally something rightfully gained when Barney had the chance and an extra buck. 

At any rate, he stood there, feeling smaller and smaller with each passing second and too aware of the conspicuous lack of mechanics or other agents or anyone at all in the enormous hanger where the jet they’d returned in had been towed. And then suddenly Fury turned and locked on him with a fierce intensity with his one good eye - an effect only heightened by the eye patch concealing the other eye and the black leather trench coat he was cloaked in. Clint stood there in the ruined uniform from the night before, still covered in concrete dust and mud and metal shavings and blood that wasn’t all his own. They’d pulled him off the plane the second it landed and hustled him into the corner where Fury waited. He hadn’t even had a chance to see if the woman was okay, to ask what was going to happen to her, as she was hurried away in another direction by a heavily armed squad of agents.

He realized Fury was still staring at him and that he hadn’t answered and he cleared his throat again and concentrated on making every syllable steady, casual, but respectful. He was going to have to play this very, very carefully. “So did I.” He paused. “At first.” 

“I see.” Fury spoke slowly too, though his unhurried speech held a note of warning. “And why did that change?” 

Clint considered the question, even as the quiet continued to be oppressive and somehow loud in the face of Fury’s obvious displeasure and he swore that he could hear his own heart beating in his throat. Words came and went in his head, each more useless than the last in trying to express just what had happened in that salt mine just outside of Krakow. 

“Agent Barton.” 

Clint blinked, focusing on Director Fury and realizing that he’d zoned out again, probably for a lot longer than he’d thought. And he still didn’t have an answer for the man. But he had to say something. He had only been part of SHIELD for six months now, and he had already been on thin ice for so many reasons even before committing what might have been the ultimate lapse in judgment in the eyes of an organization like this.  His hand wandered over to one of the many spots on his uniform where her blood had dried and for a brief second he was back there in that underground labyrinth with her, and shots were ringing out, and she was looking up at him and a bright crimson liquid made a trail across the floor - and suddenly he didn’t care what happened to him and he said the first thing that came to mind, his voice quiet with the simple truth of the statement. “She needed help.” 

* * * 

She had managed to avoid both their infirmary and a cell, though she wasn’t quite sure how she had managed either. She guessed that that Agent Barton must have said something about the medical care he’d extended to her, because from the extensive research the organizations she’d worked for had gathered about this SHIELD, she knew they were the soft type, the type that wouldn’t begin an interrogation if their subject was injured. _Weak_ , she scoffed in her head, even as she surreptitiously hunched over her own wounds. The medical care had been rudimentary, but the bleeding had stopped for the most part. She was moving more slowly, more cautiously than she would have liked to admit, and they had to have noticed, but there was little she could do about it anymore.

Natalia Romanova, the legendary Black Widow, was sitting in SHIELD’s headquarters in an interview room - voluntarily and more or less at their mercy. The room was mostly empty, save for a simple table and two chairs. They hadn’t chained her to either, and she couldn’t decide if it was out of a sense of naive trust or resigned inevitability. She knew there were two guards posted just outside the door, and that there had to be a camera showing her every move in real time on a screen somewhere else in the building, with probably a dozen or more people watching intently. She fought down the urge to shift uncomfortably, her training as always rising to the surface and keeping her unreadable. Safe. If an enemy couldn’t read you, they couldn’t prepare a targeted attack, or at least it would be a far more tedious process, buying you more time to plan your own strategy. 

But they weren’t the enemy anymore, she reminded herself with difficulty. That was why she was here. Even as part of her mind hummed with intensity and fired on pure instinct to construct an escape plan, complete with contingency plans, another part of her mind worked much more slowly, much less enthusiastically to process what she was doing, what change she had chosen to make - even though she didn’t really remember making a conscious choice. 

That man had put his weapon down and held out his hand and she’d taken it as though that had been the plan all along. 

The enormity of what she’d done suddenly made a crack in the mental walls she’d put up and she took a deep breath to steady herself, hissing as the movement pulled on the wound in her side. She tried to play off the gesture as soon as it happened, knowing there had to be cameras trained on her every gesture. She had the sick feeling that this was an injury that would require further treatment, but the longer she stayed out of their medical facilities, the better. 

An image of needles against a background of stark white sterility flashed across her eyes and her heart and stomach jumped and she quickly bent her head to hide the scowl she used to bury the reaction. The fear liked to flicker there, under the surface, smoldering back even though she’d blown it out a thousand times. Using what they’d taught her. Betraying no weakness. She surreptitiously pressed her fingers to her side and felt a little blood seep between them. Slowly. She wasn’t dying. She breathed slowly, willing the pain smaller, rolling it into a ball and pushing it away, pushing it deep inside her and smothering it with sheer willpower. 

She was made of marble. 

Slowly, Natalia straightened in the chair, taking in her bland surroundings once again, though she’d committed the important details - such as they were - to memory when she had first been escorted here by a squad of mostly stone-faced agents who had nonetheless betrayed their shock at being tasked with the custody of the Black Widow, and likely the fact that such an assignment had not left them dead in a storage closet somewhere. She had gone along willingly. Offered no resistance. 

Her mind hissed the word ‘traitor’, but what had she betrayed? She had worked for the Red Room. She had worked for the KGB. She had worked for the highest bidder. Regimes rose and fell like the tide and she was not tied to anything but the knowledge that she was smarter, faster, better trained, more deadly than whatever foe she was tasked with dispatching. She had never had to think about it. Even the more unpleasant jobs had been for a greater cause, and she was simply a part of the process. Nothing more. 

Or so she had told herself, again and again, on long nights with lonely silences, where the only distraction she had - until sheer, desperate exhaustion pulled her under to sleep - was the feedback-like white noise of her own blood pulsing through her ears and the audio ghosts of screams and howls long past. Most of the sounds were from targets. But some of the sounds were her own.

Her training had been intensive. She knew how to silence those sounds, to keep them from affecting her work.

Mostly.

But after the fire, the forced silence in her mind had taken on a life of its own. It was too close to her own nightmares, to the things that had been done to her that she had almost managed to forget. At night, she could still smell the smoke, feel it in her hair, hear the screaming- 

No. She shut her eyes. When she opened them again, she focused very pointedly on only her surroundings, and then allowed her thoughts to wander to the agent who hadn’t killed her. Clint Barton. Agent of SHIELD. Expert marksman. An assassin, like herself, with an excellent record. Until last night, it seemed. 

She’d been too stunned from the bullet and the blows and the explosion to assist in her own rescue as he had extracted her from the debris of broken concrete and bent rebar, shattered glass and spent bullets - though a tiny part of her that she silenced feverishly wondered if she hadn’t been stunned at all, but rather hoping to let death take her while allowing the SHIELD agent who foolishly cared about a human weapon the out of not being directly responsible for her death.

But she didn’t die. Agent Barton had somehow gotten her out, even as she began to oscillate between consciousness and darkness, and mostly carried her to a sad excuse for a safe house. She had been unable (unwilling?) to dress her wounds herself and the very core of her being screamed out against anyone, particularly enemy, having access to her wounds even in a supposed effort to assist, but...she’d let him. She’d let him do his awkward best to tend to her injuries and she still didn’t understand why.

Most of it was a blur. The safe house. The extraction point. The SHIELD jet. At no point had she asked him what she most wanted to know because it all still didn’t seem real - and part of her feared the answer.

It was only after perhaps hours in the air that her head had begun to clear again, but then they’d landed and SHIELD agents had taken Agent Barton one way and her another and she still wasn’t sure what was happening, or why. Now she was in a room by herself and no one had asked her any questions either and for once in her life she wasn’t entirely sure if that was a good thing or a bad thing. For the first time in a long time, she was out of her depth. The walls were suddenly very close, too close, and she had to shut her eyes again. Just for a moment. 

She fought back the instinct that told her to take the chair apart, to fashion it into a weapon, to break out of the room and subdue the two immediate guards and then the others and somehow make her way back across the Atlantic. 

There wasn’t anything left there. 

_I am made of marble_ , she reminded herself sternly. She shivered.

The marble had begun to crack.

 

 


End file.
